Three Bedrooms in Manhattan Read Online Free PDF

neon sign, and Kay again took his arm as she had during their long walk through the night.
    But now he resented her for having taken his arm the day before, for having taken the arm of a stranger so soon, so easily.
    â€œMaybe we could grab something to eat?” she asked in a joking tone.
    Joking because everything seemed like a joke to them, because they were being knocked around by the crowd as lightly as Ping-Pong balls.
    â€œYou want some dinner?”
    She burst out laughing. “Shouldn’t we have breakfast first?”
    He no longer knew who he was or how old he was. He no longer recognized the city he had stalked, bitterly and warily, for six months, and whose overwhelming lack of coherence suddenly filled him with wonder.
    This time she led the way as if it were the most natural thing in the world. He asked meekly, “Where are we going?”
    â€œTo the cafeteria in Rockefeller Center.”
    They had already reached the main building. Kay found her way easily through the vast corridors of gray marble, and for the first time he was jealous. It was ridiculous.
    Anxiously, like a teenager, he asked, “Do you come here often?”
    â€œSometimes. When I’m in the neighborhood.”
    â€œWith who?”
    â€œIdiot.”
    So in one night, in less than one night, they had miraculously run through a cycle that lovers can take weeks or months to complete.
    He was surprised to find himself eyeing the boy who took their order to make sure he didn’t know her, that she hadn’t come here a hundred times with other men. Would he make some sign of recognition to her?
    Yet he wasn’t in love with her. He was sure he wasn’t. Already he felt irritation watching her fumble in her purse for a cigarette, with her commonplace gestures, the way she brought the cigarette up to her lips, smudging it with her lipstick as she fished around for her lighter.
    She would finish her cigarette, he knew, whether or not her food arrived. She’d light another—many others, probably— before deciding to swallow down the last drop of coffee in her cup. And she’d smoke another cigarette before leaving and put on some more lipstick. She’d pout slightly, with annoying seriousness, at the mirror she carried in her purse.
    But he sat through it. He couldn’t imagine doing anything else. He waited, resigned to it, resigned to whatever else might come, and he caught sight of himself in a mirror, his smile at once tense and childish. That smile reminded him of high school, when he would torture himself with thoughts about whether or not some girl would go to bed with him.
    He was forty-eight years old.
    He hadn’t told her. They hadn’t talked about their ages. Would he tell her the truth? Would he say he was forty? Forty-two?
    Who knew, anyway, if they’d still be together in an hour, in half an hour?
    Was that why they were killing time, why they had been killing time since they’d met—because there was no reason to believe that they had any future together at all?
    The street again, where they felt easiest with each other. Their moods brightened; they rediscovered the miraculous lightness they had stumbled on earlier by chance.
    People were lining up in front of the movie theaters. Some of the velvet-covered doors guarded by men in uniforms must have led into nightclubs.
    They didn’t go into any. They didn’t even think about it. They traced their way, zigzagging through the crowds, until Kay turned to him with a smile he knew at once.
    Wasn’t that the smile that had started everything?
    He wanted to say to her, as to a child, before she even opened her mouth, “Yes …”
    Because he knew. And she understood that he knew. The proof was that she said, “Just one, all right?”
    They didn’t bother looking around, and at the first corner they pushed open the door of a little bar. It was so intimate, so cozy, so made to order